I’m beginning to think that left wing politics is the object of a higher grasp, so to speak, or at least that this is how it must appear to its critics. There are those, of course, who simply reject left wing politics outright. Hell, there are those for whom scorn of left wing politics is a favorite sport. But what really fascinates me about the response to various left wing messages are the number of people who can’t quite bring themselves to say ‘no’ outright. Instead, they have all sorts of advice for the lefties among us. You’d almost think these critics were down to help, assuming of course that help means something else.

And by ‘something else’, I mean, something other than anything actually requested at any particular time. The ‘else’ in this case is that ineffable thing in itself. Whatever thing, a lefty actually wants to see done today, that is surely out of the question. But something else? Some other request or demand, made by some other person in some other way…

I expect the folks in the not-your-mascot movement could write a book about all the helpful suggestions they’ve gotten over the years. Instead of protesting a football mascot or opposing a team name, so the thinking goes, y’all should be fixing the reservations, feeding the hungry in Native American communities, and just generally doing practical things to help indigenous people. Rarely do those offering such advice take stock of the actual efforts of such activists to help out their communities, and these critics don’t seem at all impressed by the many Native American activists who say that issues like derogatory sports teams may have something to do with the larger problems facing their people. No, the response is as simple as it is common. Stop protesting and go do something more helpful.

I hope I’ll be excused for suspecting that the ‘stop protesting’ is a little more important to those offering such advice than the “go do something more important.”

Those taking a knee at football games have certainly received similar advice. People just want to watch the game, so they are told. This isn’t the right time to protest, and when the National Anthem is playing, well then, that CERTAINLY isn’t the right time to protest! Anyway, this is all much too divisive. You’ll only alienate people. The players protesting are rich and pampered anyway, so what do they have to protest? If they want to help out more, then they should donate money and do charity work in their own communities.

You read all this stuff, and you might be tempted to think some of these critics aren’t open to concerns about possible police abuse at all, but surely that isn’t the case! Those criticizing protesters couldn’t be more clear about their willingness to consider the issue.

On another day.

In another context.

With a different messenger.

After that messenger has done a certain number of other things to earn their respect.

On this last point, you might be tempted to suggest that people like Colin Kaepernick have indeed given to charity and actively worked to help those in need, but of course this is missing the point. Clearly, he and those with him need to do more. If they do more, then people will listen to them.

Yep!

…just not during the Anthem.

Every major mass-shooting seems to trigger a wave of similar advice. Don’t politicize this! It’s too soon! Now is not the time to raise questions about gun control. Nope! Not now. Not yet.

…maybe later.

So, it seems that America might one day have a serious talk about gun control. It will have to be scheduled during an intermission of indeterminate length between actual mass shootings. This will of course require the cooperation of mass shooters, because they will have to create a pause in the carnage of sufficient length to allow the keepers of the conversation to make the call. It’s not clear just how long we must all wait between shootings, but presumably when the time frame is reached, the keepers of the conversation will proclaim the moment and we can begin to deal with the issues in a serious manner. Surely, they will tell us, when it is time! This whole too-soon thing couldn’t just be a stalling tactic. They will tell us when it is time. Until then, well, it is just to soon.

Hell, it’s too soon to ask if it’s to soon.

Shame on you for wondering about it!

Of course, one might be excused for thinking that the moment any of these conversations could take place (when the issues aren’t in the news and at events people aren’t paying attention to) would in effect constitute precisely the sort of time when the public finds the whole topic easiest to ignore, but such thoughts are far too cynical! Surely, all this advice is sincere. Surely, all these people telling us its the wrong time and the wrong message mean what they say. If only the right version of any of these messages reached their ears and eyes, they would happily consider the whole thing.

But that never seems to happen!

The actual left wing politics that we see in America is just just a little too human to be worthy of consideration. The real message, the ones so many keep saying they would consider, always seem to rest out there somewhere in the world of possibility, just a bit beyond the grasp of mere mortals. If only we could ever confront that message in itself, the real message, the properly timed message, phrased in just the right way, and put forward by the right person with just the right presentation to be worthy of consideration. Hell, I don’t know that the left wing messages could or even should win out in such an event (a lot depends on the particulars), but that’s rather academic at this point, because the time is not yet right. Under the right conditions, so it would seem, we could at least consider those lefty messages. Until then? Well, we all seem to have better things to do.

Okay, so this hashtag, #LiberalTips2AvoidRape, stood as the top trend on Twitter for much of today. Last I checked, the twitter page for this one contains a mixed bag of comments intended to illustrate the absurdity of Colorado Congressman, Joe, Salazar’s comments on the prospect of allowing guns on college campuses. Net dust-ups being what they are, quite a few folks are happy to fold any manner of insulting reference to liberals in there, and quite a few more folks have revealed (perhaps unintentionally) a trace of a tendency to blame the victim of rape in their approach to the subject. It’s an ugly chapter in a full book of ugly twitterage; y’all can see for yourself if you like:

Yes, those of us on the left have weighed in on the subject as well, not just at Twitter, but also in the mainstream media. The Huffington Post produced a piece on this, and MSNBC couldn’t help noting the irony that a Democrat had just put his foot in his mouth over the topic of rape.

What fascinates me about this issue isn’t the repugnant nature of the humor, or even the views expressed in some of the worst jokes; it’s the degree to which outrage over Salazar’s comments facilitates an interesting shift in the politics of common sense.

College campuses have traditionally been gun-free zones. (I remember this from my old freshman informative speech, which was on gun safety. I was allowed to bring a gun-stalk into class for a prop, just so long as I left the barrel at home.) It does appear that the law in question is a new development in Colorado, but access to guns on campus is definitely not the norm. Much of the American public and much more of us on the left (including a rather large number of folks in academia) see this as a basic common sense policy. Whatever the (de-)merits of gun ownership in the rest of the public, the conventional wisdom has been to keep guns off our campuses. Hell, we don’t even allow them at my college, polar bear alerts notwithstanding.

Okay, so conservatives want to see these policies changed, and many on the right side of the political spectrum have come to see gun-free zones as a terrible sort of policy. It is for them common sense that taking guns away from students, staff, and faculty makes college a more dangerous place. This is for folks on the right simply a common sense issue.

The gun lobby has even produced some reasonable arguments on the topic of safe-zones, in effect showing that a pocket of unarmed citizens in the context of a larger community full of weapons creates unfortunate unintended consequences. But of course much of this argument has focused on K-12 schools, which are smaller, and in many cases lack armed security. Colleges on the other hand typically employ security forces of their own along with a variety of measures such as call-boxes, whistles, etc. So, with or without a personal weapon, a college is not normally the kind of soft target one sees in a public school. Add to this genuine fears about the sorts of dangers armed students may themselves pose to a campus population (just think about well-armed frat brothers!) and you have a range of variables to look at. There is a genuine empirical question as to how all of these considerations stack up.

Are we safer with guns on campus or without them?

That is a fair question, and I can actually see reasonable and honest people coming down on either side of the answer to it. That is also the question Salazar was trying to answer in his speech, trying anyway. Frankly, it looks like he lost his train of thought and kept talking anyway, which was a bad idea. So, he ends up suggesting that safe zones were created to protect women (which is from the standpoint of a woman who wants to protect herself with a gun, …well, getting the problem backwards). Salazar’s argument that a woman might accidentally kill someone who isn’t attacking her is misplaced at best. Concerns over accidental gunfire, mistaken shootings, or crimes of passion, etc. require a much larger scope of considerations. Putting them all on the shoulders of a single woman (hypothetical or otherwise), particularly one in fear of genuine harm is foolishness taken to 11. And to hear Salazar making this entire case while using a universal ‘you’ throughout the speech (as if he spoke from experience) lends the whole thing a real fingernails-on-chalkboard experience.

All in all, it’s a thoroughly mockable performance. Apparently, the University of Colorado didn’t help matters by publishing some truly awful advice to rape victims on its website. And of course the point of the #LiberalTips2AvoidRape hashtag is to mock Salazar’s performance (and that of the University). …and of course to cash in on the mockery so as to finesse a number of tough questions.

Many of the tweets mocking Salazar seem to miss the basic context of the debate itself, suggesting that he thinks whistles will work most anyplace. He wasn’t. He was talking about whistles on and around a college campus. Others suggest that Salazar wants to disarm women in general, which is just a blatant misrepresentation of Salazar’s actual comments. Salazar’s suggestion that women might not know if they are about to be attacked has been taken as a suggestion that they will not know when they are actually being raped. It would seem that Salazar’s own foolishness makes a good license to add to it with a range of subtle (and not-so-subtle) misrepresentations.

The hashtag serves as an excellent vehicle for abstracting the larger question, and enabling right wing net-warriors to present their own values as the default judgement. Instead of making a case that women would be safer on campus with a gun than simply relying on all the other devices available on campus, one can simply mock Salazar (and liberals in general) for believing that a whistle could stop a rapist. And if folks would prefer to think of this in terms of an imaginary scenario where no-one else is around, well then, how many folks would check them on the fact. (It doesn’t help that Twitter tends t suspend accounts that engage in direct debate, so mistakes or distortions of this kind typically go unchallenged.) Perhaps this is one of the means by which social media seem to facilitate polarization of the issues. What can you say in a hundred and forty characters that won’t be some variety of ‘y’all suck!’

No, I’m not concerned about about netiquette here. Some people do suck, and I have no problem when folks want to call them out for it. What does concern me is the degree to which this new whipping boy for the right seems to be serving as a short-cut right through an interesting discussion about whether or not we (as a nation) want to open up a variety of safe zones to gun owners. I’m also fascinated by the degree to which the status quo for college campuses has, at least in the minds of the right wing, become a form of lunacy. Why make the case for your own policy preferences when you can simply point at Joe Salazar and watch the left squirm? And through all of this, the bulk of the public will never hear a solid case for the net-effect of changing gun-laws on college campuses.

The prospects for a reasonable discussion of gun-control have never been very good.

I suppose it is too much to ask that folks distinguish the varieties of gun control from an outright ban. The way the gun rights crowd raises the specter of a completely disarmed populace when speaking about any variety lesser measures smacks of dishonesty.

It would hardly give away the farm to distinguish such things from one another. There are plenty of legitimate questions about the efficacy of lesser gun control measures, especially when applied to a population already so well armed as we are here in the U.S. But that is an interesting and well focused discussion some folks don’t seem to want to risk.

But what is really fascinating about memes like this is the slippage between a right to bear arms and a prescription for doing so. The second Amendment was alive and well when the internment of Japanese occurred in the first place. So, that right and that right alone simply is not a cure for the evil that this pic wants us to think about. The meme only works if we are to imagine a population which is not merely in possession of the right to bear arms, but which actively uses that right even to the point of preparing for war against its own government.

And can anyone really imagine Japanese immigrant population of the west coast doing this in the years leading up to World War II? Can anyone imagine the response from their neighbors?

This is not merely a defense of the Second Amendment, it is an argument for the expansion of private gun ownership well beyond anything previously imagined in American history. To make this argument work, we need more than just the right to bear arms, we all need to have the arms, the training to use them, and enough firepower to make them an effective counter to the powers of the United States Government.

Is the author suggesting that gun owners could stop such a thing as internment? Perhaps, but would they?

It’s a pretty common claim from the gun rights crowd, the notion that the Second Amendment puts the teeth in the rest of our civil rights. It is through gun ownership, so the argument goes, that people are protected from abuse by government officials. It is the most important means by which our rights are protected.

Pardon me, …from ‘thuh government.’

But gun owners did not stop the internment of Japanese.

Or of Aleuts during the same war.

Neither did they stop lynching of blacks.

Nor did gun owners secure the right to vote for African Americans.

…or for women.

…or Native Americans.

Gun owners did not stop the Federal Government from kidnapping Native American children to be taken to schools far from their families.

It was not gun owners that secured for any number of minorities the right to an education or any other protections by states or the federal government.

In each of these instances, the rights in question were won by protestors, and lawyers, and people who talked a hell of a lot, even if their main opponents didn’t. In many of these instances gun owners were actively involved in the very repression suffered by those in question. Since the founding of the country, Gun violence has played a far greater role in the repression of civil rights than it has in protecting them. There are exceptions to be sure, but this narrative is not built on the exceptions. It is built on a fantasy that skips any active consideration of how these things actually work.

Herein lies the biggest problem with this fantasy scenario; it presents us with the image of a government acting on its own, independent of the public will. That could happen, I suppose, but is far less likely than the countless times in which government policies actually have facilitated repressive measures popular with the American people, or at least a large segment of it. And in such moments, the victims of repression have rarely been sufficiently well armed to make an effective stand against those who wanted a piece of their liberty.

In real world history, those who have suffered the greatest deprivations did not merely face the threat of Federal Authority; they also have had to contend with the prejudice of an American population content to have them suffer.

…one that sometimes even demanded it.

We can imagine the victims of repression better armed, yes, but only if we also imagine the majority better armed as well. This is hardly a story which leads to a successful defense of liberty. I would call the scenario anarchy, but I don’t wish to sully the term ‘anarchy’ with such a vision of violence and destruction.

It’s damned hard to read these self-indulgent fantsies when considering the actual history of people struggling for their rights. It’s hard to give credence to this juvenile narrative, knowing what it took for the people in these camps to survive, what it took the Freedom Riders to earn rights enjoyed by gun-toting whites in the South. And it is especially hard to hear such arguments from those with so little to say about such things as Guantanamo Bay or the countless encroachments on Fourth Amendment Rights we’ve seen over the last few decades.

What pisses me off about this argument isn’t the defense of gun ownership, or even opposition to gun control. Frankly I don’t think this kind of crap even touches either one of those issues. It sheds no light on those issues whatsoever, and leave us with a whole different discussion to have if we can ever get clear of noise like this. What bothers me about this stuff is the scorched-earth tactics; the vision of politics as warfare and questions about rights as an invitation to shoot at one another. It’s a vision of government as a faceless evil empire in opposition to private citizens, and begging for opposition from heroic gun-owners everywhere. Folks telling this yarn have no sense of how such things actually happen. But they are happy to tell stories of gun-toting heroes squaring off against a government turned inexplicably on its own population. How that will work is a Hell we can only hope we will never see.

And it’s a Hell as likely to be brought about by gun-owners defending their own rights (as they define them) as anything done by a corrupt and tyrannical government.

While others have struggled and died for some of the most basic human rights imaginable, so many in the gun crowd openly fantasize about acts of violence over basic policy disagreements and the possibility of restricted access to a commodity. The pretense that this commodity is the key to civil rights plays a big role in these fantasies. The end result is a tantrum born of paranoia and privilege and a gun culture increasingly dangerous to the rest of us.

No. I’m not talking about the weapons. I am talking about the mindset of people who produce memes like the one above. People who make such arguments are not interested in protecting anyone under serious threat of government repression. The gun rights crowd did not protect the Japanese during World War II, and I for one don’t believe they will be there the next time someone decides to create camps like this.

So, I just saw this campaign video from Joe “The Plumber” Worzelbacher (He’s Running for a House Seat in Ohio), and I swear a little part of me just died. It’s not like I was expecting much from Joe, or from the political opportunists intent on helping him stretch his fifteen minutes (and the collective Hell that goes with it) just a little longer. But Damn! If stupid really does burn, then the state of Ohio needs to open a new hospital wing just to deal the fall-out from this particular idiot-bomb.

I’m going to say right off the bat that I don’t know enough about the Armenian Holocaust to really deal with it properly. I will add that I would be damned surprised if Joe did either, or the idiot who wrote his speech in this video, whoever that may have been and whatever drug he may have been taking at the time.

On one level, Joe’s argument really presents a very simple exercise in fallacy recognition. He mentions two laws followed by two genocides. Joe offers no analysis in support of his contention that they are linked, but he does fire off a couple rounds while giving us time to let the obvious connection sink in. …and my gosh golly aren’t we all impressed!

It should be added that Joe has subsequently denied he was claiming gun control caused the Holocaust, and then he went on to explain that it could never have happened without disarming the people first. (Actually, Joe attributes this particular claim to Hitler, so I suppose he still has grounds for plausible deniability on the matter, but of course the question is why does he bring it up if he doesn’t intend to advance the claim?) Seriously, this is the rhetoric of a complete coward. If he can’t make up his mind whether or not he means to say gun control made the Holocaust possible, then he really ought to shut his festering gob.

Irony of Ironies, Joe thinks his critics are pushing a political agenda. (And seriously, how lacking in self-consciousness do you have to be to make such an accusation about people critical of YOUR OWN POLITICAL CAMPAIGN ADD?) Joe also says that his critics must hate history, because apparently they don’t want to hear it. One of Joe’s spokesman (Phil Christofanelli) adds that Joe is a student of history. …yeah right! The prospect that Joe’s critics may just know more about the subject than he or his speech writer does seems to escape these guys, …or perhaps they are simply hoping that prospect will escape Ohio voters.

But of course Joe isn’t the only happy hustler to trot this line of powdered camel dung out and offer us a straw. It’s a fairly conventional line of bullshit from the gun lobby and assorted gun enthusiasts, …actually, I should say from the less intelligent and completely dishonest members of gun-toting crowd. Seriously, there are decent and intelligent gun-owning folks out there. You can tell who they are because they are not the ones laying this line of crap down on the table and expecting you tor snort it.

But lets sort through a few specifics, shall we? Near as I can tell Joe was actually talking about a gun control law passed in 1938, but let’s not quibble over that detail. No, let’s quibble over the fact that Germany had already passed gun control laws in 1919, 1920, and 1928. Each of these laws modified the legal options for gun ownership in different ways, and there is no clear reason to choose the 1938 law as the smoking gun (pun intended) for Nazi gun control. Joe’s sophisticated periodization is little other than an ad hoc choice of the date most convenient to his own narrative (much as his choice of 1939 as the beginning of the holocaust-according-to-Joe). Joe picked the most convenient date for his own story, and that was about it.

Did I mention this argument is pure camel dung?

Okay, but let’s think about this for a minute. 1938(9)? What had already happened in Germany by that point? Well, let’s see. On the basis of the 1932 elections, Hitler had been appointed Chancellor in January of 1933. This was followed soon after by a suspicious fire in the Reichstag (German parliamentary building) that February. The following day President Hindenburg granted Hitler emergency powers, and in March the German Parliament (under great pressure from the Nazi party) signed away the bulk of its powers to Hitler in a law known as the Enabling Act. In effect, the democratic institutions of Weimar Germany had already come to a pretty full stop by the end of 1934, 5 years before the key to everything in Joe’s gun-induced euphoria.

…and of course by this time the Nazis were already locking up their political enemies.

In late June and early July of 1934, Nazi leadership killed about a hundred of their own in a fascinating little purge known as the “Night of the Long Knives.” By early August Hitler had fused the offices of President and Chancellor, thus making himself, …well, der Fuhrer. And with that Nazi leadership is in pretty much full swing, the law is what they say it is at this point in history, …4-5 years before the law Joe offers as the key to it all.

The Nuremberg Laws were passed in 1935, installing legal repression of Jews throughout Germany, 4 years before the terrible law which Joe wants us to believe made it all possible.

Despite all the crimes the Nazis had already committed, all the freedoms they had already taken away, Joe wants us to think a law passed in 1938(9) made it all possible. It’s amazing! It is completely asinine to suggest that private German citizens were in a position to stop Nazi atrocities in 1938, let alone to suggest the largely unarmed Jewish population, could have managed it. This is not history. This is fantasy.

So, just remember this the next time one of these smug little idiots decides to illustrate the Dunning-Kruger Effect by giving you the pop-gun and bubble-gum history of the Holocaust, conveniently simplified for the benefit of the American gun-lobby. There is only one way to make that argument, and that is to be so damned ignorant about the history in question that you just don’t know any better.